Currently reading: Black Swan. Difficult book to read as it is written poorly. Basically it argues that our humanness makes us under-estimate uncertainty and randomness.
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Currently reading: Black Swan. Difficult book to read as it is written poorly. Basically it argues that our humanness makes us under-estimate uncertainty and randomness.
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Confusing article on red light cameras which focuses too heavily on balance. This is the leading sentence though, "The number of crashes at Houston intersections with red-light cameras doubled in the first year after their installation, according to a city-financed study released Monday."
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Not sure what I am supposed to read here, everything is so over-accentuated.
Too much under-lining, bold, etc. Sometimes texts have to survive on rhetoric alone.
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I planted Saguaros from seed this evening. It is my second try at it. Despite giving off 250,000 seeds each year, the high protein seeds rarely are given a chance to germinate.
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Via Preik. The fits and starts of human achievement. The Renaissance to the Enlightenment was centuries.
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Interesting: "With the release today of Firefox 3.0.5, we're no longer displaying a EULA on install ... Instead, we'll be displaying an infobar that makes people aware of the about:rights text, which outlines how Firefox is licensed, the first time Firefox 3.0.5 is run."
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Arguing the importance of social networks: "Married people were indeed healthier - if they weren't lonely in their marriages. If they were, the health benefits were so negligible the researchers considered them statistically insignificant."
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The 2008 US Presidential election has seen Nate Silver become a media personality with his fivethirtyeight.com website which became the psephology site of record during the campaign and election. Ironically its popularity on election night was more than blogger could handle and it locked. Sites like dailykos expend exorbitant engineering costs and effort to make sure their sites can handle the peak load of an election night, I suspect fivethirtyeight will not make the same mistake.
Currently reading: The Italian Renaissance. I would not recommend it. This is a collection of short stories/histories on the city-states and personalities of the time. No real narrative and it is difficult to connect the events, people and states through the each chapter.
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Technology and politics, as opposed to tech for tech's sake: "That said, its worth noting that the folks on the left Erickson acknowledges as models actually tend to be people with political backgrounds who learned some tech, not the opposite. Joe Rospars, Eli Pariser, and Markos Moulistas all have degrees in political science, not computer science."
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I think this is very cool, Stephanie Syjuco's personal protest against her own bad habits. It reminds me a bit of xkcd's protesting methodology or Father Ted's placards which read "Down with this sort of thing" and "Careful Now".
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Twas xmas eve in North America, with the Australian continent already under its spell. Happy xmas.
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Yuppy's morning; macbook, iphone and a big mug of coffee on the bedside table.
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Currently Reading: Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. Fascinating book. I am halfway through it and highly recommend it. It covers in detail Cheney's views on executive power, separation of powers, and political power.
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From here: "Both cities and the Internet are at once highly atomized and elaborately connected milieus that encourage both solitude and interaction with the diverse, bountiful unwashed." Considering how much social interaction goes on via the internet, its main use and value is as a social tool and in maintaining diverse, multi-national and wider social networks.
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John Gruber, "Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience"
A graphic description of the same principle via stuff that happens:
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Via designboom; a stunningly designed turntable. Previously I have linked to the Montegiro turntables. Sometimes old tech made new is cool.
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